The death toll keeps rising in Iraq. Among the details in today's article about Saturday's raid on Baghdad's Shiite Sadr City slum, is this news:

....two American soldiers are accused of killing three Iraqis in separate incidents, then planting weapons on the victims' remains, the military said in a statement. Fellow soldiers reported the alleged crimes, which took place between April and this month near Iskandariyah, 30 miles south of Baghdad, it said.

The U.S. military on Saturday identified the soldiers as Staff Sgt. Michael A. Hensley from Candler, N.C., and Spc. Jorge G. Sandoval from Laredo, Texas.

More....

Lowell Feld writes up Senator Jim Webb's blogger conference call today:

Sen. Webb started off by talking about how he shared the "disappointment" of many regarding "the way the appropriations supplemental was handled by our party." He had hoped that his amendment, which would require that soldiers can't be redeployed unless they've been home at least that long, would have been attached to the supplemental. That would have cut right to the "inviolable bottom line" regarding how our troops are being used. The logic on that was "unassailable and clear," so if the President had vetoed it, everyone would have understood what he was doing. . . .

I think the questions to be asked about this statement are obvious. Feld reports the following questions:

Yesterday, Matt Yglesias noted he was taken to task by Red State and other Right blogs for being a pointy-headed Harvard grad pontificating about things military. So it was great irony today to see, as reported by The Angry Rakkasan, General John Batiste, who commanded the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq, being lectured to by pointy-head AEI scholar Frederick Kagan on things military. Rakkasan links to the Chicago Trib blog which reported:

Major Gen. John Batiste (ret.) who commanded the Army's First Infantry Division in Iraq, and is a respected critic of the war, said the insurgents have the initiative since they can pick where and when to explode a truck bomb for instance. But Frederick Kagan, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, rejected that view, saying that under the new strategy being executed by Gen. David Petraeus, the top commander in Iraq, the initiative was on the U.S. military's side. . . . It was one of those strange Washington moments where the military expert with real experience as a combatant commander in the battlespace at issue was being told he was wrong by an Inside-the-Beltway expert who likely never fired a weapon at anyone in anger.

I expect outraged posts throughout the Right blogs to protest this lack of respect for military experience. No I don't.

Matt Yglesias revisits the points he and I made yesterday about the emptiness of the Lugar/Voinovich "opposition" to Bush's Iraq policy:

When Republicans want to . . . vote to override Bush's veto, then they'll be breaking with Bush on Iraq. Until then, both the ones talking a good game and the ones talking bad one are, in fact, backing the president. What's more, it seems to me that we're well passed the point where any political purpose is advanced in a useful way by deliberately exaggerating the extent of intra-GOP disagreement. Before the 2004 election was a good time to hear about Republican dissent. Before the 2006 election, even. But folks who wait until after an electoral drubbing to start distancing themselves from their party's leaders don't deserve to be hailed as great independent thinkers.

Two points. First, the legislation Bush vetoed did not even have BINDING timelines. Second, when Matt writes "both the ones talking a good game and the ones talking a bad one are, in fact, backing the president," that applies to Democrats too.

When I first heard about Lugar's "groundbreaking" speech on Iraq, I wrote:

I suspect that come September, Lugar will join the August group of Warner, Hagel and Smith and speak about change but go along with Bush.

I was wrong. It didn't take until September. Via Yglesias, Lugar has ALREADY said he is not changing his vote on Iraq:

However, [Lugar spokesman Andy] Fisher said the speech does not mean Lugar would switch his vote on the war or embrace Democratic measures setting a deadline for troop withdrawals.

What a joke.

In a much vaunted speech, Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN), ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relation Committee, has broken ranks with the Bush Iraq policy. However, I see a fundamental flaw in what Lugar says that leaves us pretty much where we were. Lugar said:

The current debate on Iraq in Washington has not been conducive to a thoughtful revision of our Iraq policy. Our debate is being driven by partisan political calculations and understandable fatigue with bad news — including deaths and injuries to Americans. We have been debating and voting on whether to fund American troops in Iraq and whether to place conditions on such funding. We have contemplated in great detail whether Iraqi success in achieving certain benchmarks should determine whether funding is approved or whether a withdrawal should commence. I would observe that none of this debate addresses our vital interests any more than they are addressed by an unquestioned devotion to an ill-defined strategy of “staying the course” in Iraq.

President Bush will not countenance any straying from staying his course. There is a reason why NOT funding the Iraq Debacle is our only hope. Because President Bush will not budge. I have heard many pretty speeches from Republicans, including the much lauded John Warner, on how we must change course. But each and every one of these Republicans has failed to confront Bush and demand binding timelines for troop withdrawal. I suspect that come September, Lugar will join the August group of Warner, Hagel and Smith and speak about change but go along with Bush. I for one, will not be fooled again. Democrats must insist on a truly binding withdrawal date from Iraq - by not funding the Debacle after a date certain.

I hate to say this about an execution, but it seems in the case of Chemical Ali, we've been here before, done that.

Ali Hassan al-Majeed -- a former general known as "Chemical Ali" -- received five death sentences for ordering the use of deadly mustard gas and nerve agents against the Kurds during the so-called Anfal campaign. Majeed and [Saddam] Hussein were cousins.

There was no great uproar, just some human rights groups protesting Saddam's executions, and I think you will see the same for Chemical Ali, albeit on a lesser scale.

He has 30 days to appeal his sentence.

Neither should have been tried by the Iraqi tribunal, but by an International Court. I doubt it will get the same media attention in the U.S. that Saddam's execution did.

The death penalty is barbaric, and what else do you expect of a country like Iraq. We've been there four years trying to instill democracy, and they sure haven't come very far. But then again, neither have we in the death penalty department.

I'd give him life without parole in a country where he knows no one. A very cold country, like Siberia. Maybe then he will have time to reflect on the egregrious acts of genocide he ordered or acquiesced in.

Two weeks ago, Frank Rich berated persons like me because:

On the Democratic side, the left is furious at the new Congress’s failure to instantly fulfill its November mandate to end the war in Iraq. . . . It’s not exactly clear how a legislative Groundhog Day could accomplish this feat when the president’s obstinacy knows no bounds and the Democrats’ lack of a veto-proof Congressional majority poses no threat to his truculence.

Rich professed faith in John Warner to come to the rescue. This week Rich writes:

Americans and Iraqis know the truth anyway. The question now is: What will be the new new way forward? . . . Come September 2007, Mr. Bush will offer his usual false choices. We must either stay his disastrous course in eternal pursuit of "victory" or retreat to the apocalypse of "precipitous withdrawal." . . . For the Bush White House, the real definition of victory has become "anything they can get away with without taking blame for defeat," said the retired Army Gen. William Odom, a national security official in the Reagan and Carter administrations, when I spoke with him recently. The plan is to run out the Washington clock between now and Jan. 20, 2009, no matter the cost.

Who can stop them? Rich says it is up to John Warner:

Sit down. The news I am going to provide you, via the Washington Post, will shock you. The United States does not have enough troops in Iraq to carry out the mission it has been given:

. . . Retired Army Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, who in 2003 was among the first to call public attention to the relatively small size of the U.S. invasion force, said that the new operation shows how outnumbered U.S. troops remain. "Why would we think that a temporary presence of 30,000 additional combat troops in a giant city would change the dynamics of a bitter civil war?" he said in an interview yesterday. "It's a fool's errand."

An officer working in Arrowhead Ripper, the subsidiary offensive in Diyala province, said wearily, "We just do not have the forces in country right now to have the appropriate level of presence across the country."

Many counterinsurgency experts agree. Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr., the director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a national security think tank, said flatly that Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, does not have enough troops. "I suspect General Petraeus is taking a risk here, but that's what commanders do," he said.

Who'da thunk it? Well, actually everyone with a brain, starting with General Eric Shinseki:

bumblebums reports on a e-mail from Senator Russ Feingold on Carl Levin's history of "not funding the troops:"

Senator Levin went on in his op-ed to grossly mischaracterize the legislation Majority Leader Harry Reid and I have introduced as somehow cutting or "stopping funding for the troops." That is extremely disappointing as it is well known that the Feingold-Reid bill ends funding for this war after our men and women in uniform have been safely redeployed out of Iraq.

. . . After all, Senator Levin and many others now in the Senate supported using Congress's 'power of the purse' before. In October of 1993, they voted for a similar effort with regard to Somalia. At that time, 75 Senators voted for an amendment to set a deadline after which funding for the military mission in Somalia would end and our troops would be safely redeployed. That bill was passed into law.

I'm not sure why some Democrats and many Republicans have flipped on this issue in the 14 years since. . . .

(Emphasis supplied.) What would Lincoln say Senator Levin?

MYDD interviews Speaker Pelosi, who has this to say about Iraq:

Jonathan Singer: You talked about the real need to have 60 votes in the Senate and perhaps even 67 and 290 in the House to override the President and get things done. Even understanding that, given the fact that the standing of Congress has declined since Iraq has really been on the table in Congress, do you feel like something else should have been done? You could have taken different steps? Or what does it tell you about moving forward?

Nancy Pelosi: I believe that we're right on course. We had the votes to say that there are timelines and the President had to honor them. The President vetoed the bill. There isn't much more you can do after that.

But, no, I'm very proud of what we've done in the Congress. I know outside people are dissatisfied. And I am too. . . . But we're right on schedule. . . .

Right on schedule? All you can do? Um, the Founding Fathers would beg to differ. As would President Bush himself.

Soldiers, their families, their friends, and their country continue to pay a heavy price for the Bush administration's intransigent refusal to change course in Iraq:

Fourteen American soldiers were killed in five separate incidents over the last 48 hours, most of them in Baghdad, including a roadside explosion in the capital that killed five soldiers and four Iraqis, the American military said today.